Latest / STR Unpacked / The UK just made it official.
Transcript
- Ben: Good morning and welcome to your short term rental bulletin on the 14th of May. Yesterday was a weird day in the UK. We've got a government in turmoil ⁓ and we also had a whole royal parade going on and you'd be forgiven to think that STR rentals may not come into what was going on yesterday in the UK. However, the King made a speech and in that speech, for those that don't know, the King outlays the plans for the government for the year. And within that King's speech, they dropped a tourist tax bombshell on the UK short-term rental industry. So if you operate in England, you need to be paying attention to this. So yesterday, King Charles III opened parliament with the overnight visitor levy bill. Now, it's a standalone legislation pulled out of the devolution bill. and the government is calling it the first step of a new era of fiscal devolution. So what's going on here? So West Yorkshire's Tracy Brabin and York and North Yorkshire's David Skye have already said they'll start using the powers. Andy Burnham, if he's still mayor of Manchester in a week's time, and Sadiq Khan in London have also expressed interest in using this. York St John University reckons there'll be a £2 per room night levy which raises £52 million a year for that region. The national projections hit around £1.2 billion a year. So here's the bit I think no one's really talking about out loud. The bill makes operators legally liable to collect it. So you collect it, you record it, you remit it quarterly and VAT is charged on top of the levy because you're legally, you're paying it, not the guest. That's not a tourist tax, it's an operator tax with a marketing department. So Edinburgh goes live in July, Wales, April, 2027. England, we don't know yet, but probably around 2027, 2028. So the clock started. If I were you, I would start getting your systems ready now, because by the time you're there, announces you'll have 12 months to be audit ready across every booking and every property. Thank you for watching and I'll see you tomorrow.